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flexagoonon MicroG: Free-libre re-implementation of Google's proprietary Android user space

The apps that use Google analytics/ads don't need Google Services on the device. The libraries are embedded into the app, and have just as much fingerprinting capabilities as sandboxes Google services.

flexagoonon GLP-1 may slow biological aging

Since when is it bad to create technology that gives people an easier way to solve their problems and live a better life?

flexagoonon DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017

Depends on the question. Most models won't tell you how to make weapons because they're trained not to, but the political stuff is usually blocked on the API level

flexagoonon /dev/null: social network for developers

Isn't that just called hosting a website?.. You can just give an agent access to your server and let them do all that, no?

There are also places like https://tilde.town/ if you want something more social media–esque

flexagoonon Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe

Sure, but in this case "Europe" clearly refers to EU, just like people call USA "America"

flexagoonon Thinking will become a hobby

That depends on the country. There are a bunch of places where you get paid pretty well to do a PhD. Sure, if you consider the opportunity cost of not being a senior software engineer in San Francisco making 300k it's not a lot, but by that logic every other job is a hobby.

flexagoonon Doory – Open-Source Canva

I don't understand why someome capable of self hosting would use a "Canva alternative" instead of something normal like Inkscape/Figma/...

Canva is so bad. It's impossible to align stuff properly. Text rendering is awful. Official builtin templates have horrible kerning. It's genuinely one of the worst graphic editors I've used, and I'm not even remotely a professional designer. I don't want a "Canva alternative", I want a normal editor.

flexagoonon NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect

> Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings”

Isn't this already illegal? By law the websites are required to make full opt out single click. They just don't care.

flexagoonon NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect

Where does that page mention anything about cookie banners? I couldnt find it

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

I don't blame Ukraine for doing this. I understand it fully. Russia invades and attacks them, they defend and attack back. That's what war is. But I don't understand the people on HN saying this attack is somehow "good" for anyone.

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

> 89% of Russians approved Putin

According to Putin.

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

The billionaire tech oligarchs are owners of other Russian big tech, and they all have their own data centers. Some of them also have their own cloud services, so if anything this just redirects the money to them from Yandex Cloud.

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

Putin is a psychopath who doesn't care about anything. He gets money for the war anywhere he can. If 99% of the Russian economy gets destroyed, he'd redirect the remaining 1% to fully fund the war.

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

Where is 10% coming from?

20% of Russians were ready to vote for an anti-war party in the last elections before it was illegally removed from the ballots, and many more don't support the war. The people who do are mostly old or live in small towns with no access to education. I doubt many of them are Yandex Cloud users.

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

I am not a Russian shill. I fully support Ukraine and do not support the Russian war crimes. This doesn't help stop them, it just harms random people who happen to live in a war criminal dictatorship.

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

What about the innocent users who didn't? Russia is not a democracy.

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

Завтра в школу дружище отдохни

flexagoonon 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

It isn't. It doesn't affect Yandex's own services, but ruins thousands of businesses and projects hosted there. Even if you hate Amazon or Google, you probably wouldn't want AWS or Google Cloud datacenters destroyed by Iran, because that would just affect innocent users.

flexagoonon Lobbying is corruption

> Have you ever tried to explain lobbying to a European?

Huh? What Europe are they talking about?

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparen...

flexagoonon Sorry, I'm in a meeting

Fwiw, creators get much more for views with Premium than for ad views. Still not a lot though. I think it was Linus Tech Tips who said that you buying one item of their merch gives them more money than watching every single video on their channel combined.

flexagoonon Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

The GWWC pledge is very explicitly an EA initiative.

If you're talking about stem cell and blood donations, yes, there are many EAs who are against that for stupid reasons like "why would I spend 30 minutes donating blood when I can spend them on my very effective work", but those are also just the vocal minority and most are pretty reasonable about doing easy helpful things in addition to the main "effective" stuff. Notably for example, many EAs even do undirected kidney donations, despite other EAs arguing it's not "effective" enough.

flexagoonon Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

It's not AI slop, it's just bland design with corporate speak that the AI got trained on. There are plenty of pre-LLM sites just like that (most shadcn websites, for example)

flexagoonon Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

Yeah, and his original ideas are mostly about helping poor countries, and some about helping animals. Those two things are still two of three main EA cause areas, and they're the good parts of the community (if you agree with the core ideas)

But then came all the people who believe AI will absolutely kill us all, and nowadays the EA community is mostly Anthropic employees thinking their work is the most important thing anyone can ever do and that they're literally saving humanity from extinction. It's just based on vibes, but they try to make it seem very evidence based by associating with a hardcore utilitarian philosophy.

It's kinda funny going to any EA website and seeing paragraphs like

"What can X$ achieve? 1. Save a human life 2. Save 500 animal lives 3. Fund 1 week of AI research"

One of those is not like the others, and yet the people advocating for it are the most vocal and famous part of EA.

flexagoonon Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

Eh, it's more like a small international aid community which got taken over by a very vocal death cult of SF software engineers.

flexagoonon Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

I'd also like to point people towards the Giving What We Can pledge to donate some percentage of their income to charity.

While this is of course closely related to EA, which many people here are (both deservedly and undeservedly) not big fans of, it doesn't require you to choose some specific charities or agree with their moral framework. Consistently donating money to whatever cause you personally value would make the world a much better place compared to not donating anything.

I really recommend people consider doing it regardless of their views on EA or the charities they recommend. I'm not a big fan of the modern EA community myself, but I agree that the money that barely make a difference in my life could be life changing for others.

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

On a somewhat unrelated note, also consider signing up for blood and stem cell donation!

flexagoonon Tell HN: I've been paying for a rural Tanzanian's education for 10 years

https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/

https://rendered.one/

Those two sites help with job matching for nonprofits. The first has both volunteering and paid positions, the second only paid AFAIK.

flexagoonon Apple Pass Designer

But if a company already has their own custom app for their bonus card, that means they already have the developer subscription

flexagoonon StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta

OpenStreetMap is a database, not a map application. The map on the official openstreetmap website is more of a demo to show some of the data. There are many different map apps that use OpenStreetMap data though.

flexagoonon PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock

The installation instructions are here

https://docs.yattee.stream/docs/app/getting-started

flexagoonon PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock

> Just noticed, now that Tubular is no longer maintained

How have you just noticed that when Tubular reliably broke every single month when YouTube changes something and you had to wait for weeks for it to be fixed? It was barely maintained for a long time now